Directions: Study the following information carefully and answer the question given below.
Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:
High above the Old Town Square in Prague, within the hollow stone belfry of the Old Town Hall, Master Horologist Jan Dvoลรกk held a brass oiler over the escapement of the Orloj. For six centuries, this monumental astronomical clock had measured not merely mortal minutes, but Babylonian hours, planetary movements, and lunar phases. To the thousands of tourists gazing upward from the cobblestones below, the clock was an ingenious theatrical spectacleโa rotating parade of sculpted wooden apostles and a skeletal Grim Reaper chiming a silver bell. Yet to Jan, who had wound its iron counterweights every dawn for forty years, the machine was a living organism with a delicate, mechanical cardiovascular pulse.
During a routine seasonal inspection, Jan detected a faint, arrhythmic clicking within the astrolabe drive. Removing the heavy lantern gear with cotton-gloved hands, he found a fractured bronze tooth on the zodiacal ringโa minuscule rupture caused by centuries of micro-frictional wear. A younger civic municipal inspector urged him to fabricate a lightweight titanium replacement using modern three-dimensional sintering. Jan shook his head emphatically. Modern alloys, with their unyielding crystalline rigidity, would gradually chew through the softer, hand-hammered 15th-century iron pinions. 'To heal an ancient mechanism,' Jan explained softly, 'one must respect the metallurgy of its epoch. If we introduce alien metals, we donโt prolong its life; we orchestrate its internal destruction.'
Why did Master Horologist Jan Dvoลรกk firmly reject the civic inspector's proposal to use 3D-sintered titanium gears?
๐ก Solution & Explanation:
Correct Answer: (D)
Core Concept: Reading Comprehension โ Detail Retrieval
Step-by-Step Solution:
1. Paragraph 2 explains Jan's refusal: 'Modern alloys, with their unyielding crystalline rigidity, would gradually chew through the softer, hand-hammered 15th-century iron pinions.'
2. Option (D) is an exact restatement of this metallurgical reasoning.
3. Options B, C, and D are contradicted by the text.
Key Shortcut / Exam Tip: Titanium rigidity would chew through softer iron pinions.